We may never see Polymarket issue a token

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author｜jk

On October 8, 2025, Polymarket founder Shayne Coplan casually posted a tweet on X: "$BTC $ETH $BNB $SOL $POLY 🤔". Five tickers side by side — the first four were top-tier mainstream coins by market cap, and the fifth was an official token that Polymarket did not even have yet. At the time, everyone thought $POLY was coming.

Source: X

Fifteen days later, on October 23, growth lead William LeGate mentioned the phrase "expected airdrop users" during a podcast or related discussion. Then, on October 24, 2025, CMO Matthew Modabber said on the podcast Degenz Live what remains the closest thing to an official announcement to date: "There will be a token, and, well, there will be an airdrop. We could launch it at any time, but we want it to have real utility and longevity, to be able to exist for the long term."

That was the real starting point of this story. It has been nearly a year since then. But is Polymarket still going to launch a token?

A Promise Never Retracted, and Never Fulfilled

If you open Polymarket's help center right now, you will see a standardized anti-scam statement: "Polymarket has not announced any plans for an airdrop or a token generation event." It has coexisted with Modabber's official confirmation that "there will be a token" for nearly a year, and neither side has come forward to correct the other.

In September 2024, The Information reported that Polymarket planned to issue token warrants to investors in a funding round of roughly $50 million — meaning that before the token had been issued, what investors received in the financing was not the token itself (since it did not yet exist), but a warrant. This warrant stipulated that if the company did eventually issue a token, the investors holding the warrants would have the right to subscribe to a certain number of tokens under pre-agreed terms (such as a certain price or a certain ratio).

After entering November 2025, the focus of official discussion began to shift from whether there would be an airdrop to what kind of behavior would disqualify someone from receiving one. On November 11, responding to questions about wash trading, William LeGate made it clear that, in essence, accounts farmed through Sybil attacks would not receive any airdrop allocation and were simply wasting their time.

On February 4, 2026, the parent company Blockratize Inc. formally filed an intent-to-use trademark application with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for the name "POLY," covering digital currency and crypto platform services categories.

On May 13, product lead Dustin Karp posted a photo of a workstation, with a caption saying he had walked past Mustafa's desk. After the community zoomed in on the photo, someone pointed out what appeared to be an internal page tab related to the airdrop on the screen. Around the same period, LeGate was also answering community questions about identity badges: blue badges represent Polymarket employees, Traders badges are for users who have reached a cumulative profit of $100,000 or have sufficiently large trading volume, and Builders badges are for projects building on the Polymarket ecosystem. When someone asked whether posting content on X could also earn airdrop eligibility, LeGate's answer was that linking an X account to a Polymarket account was only one-third of the requirement; users also needed to put their profile link in their X bio and continuously share trading records and market views on X.

It was precisely because of this round of escalation that prediction markets at one point priced in quite optimistic odds. As of mid-May 2026, on predict.fun, the probability of "Polymarket will launch an official token before the end of this year" was once quoted at 56%, and the probability of "FDV exceeding $6 billion on the first day of trading" was quoted at 51%.

Odaily previously summarized all the signs of Polymarket issuing a token. See the article for details: "POLY Hints Are Piling Up — How Far Away Is the Polymarket Airdrop?".

But this round of hype was also almost the last time the whole story appeared with such intensity. By July 6, 2026, Mustafa was still publicly recruiting "the world's top tokenomics model builders." Yet by August 2026, according to what is known, this engineer had already left Polymarket.

In an analysis dated August 26, 2026, crypto media outlet The Merkle offered a possible explanation: a company that has already formally filed an intent-to-use trademark application with the federal government has clearly moved past the stage where executives can casually tweet tickers without triggering securities law disclosure issues.

JPMorgan's Cutoff and the Shift Toward Compliance

On August 14, 2026, the UK's Financial Times was the first to break a story that had been buried for nearly a year: as early as October 2025, JPMorgan had notified Polymarket, citing "regulatory concerns," that it needed to find another bank — a so-called "cutoff." Reuters followed up independently that evening, and Bloomberg republished the story the same day. Coincidentally, that timing was exactly the same month Coplan posted that token-ticker tweet on X.

At the same time, however, while JPMorgan did not want to take on bank account risk, it was unusually enthusiastic about a Polymarket IPO. In February 2026, JPMorgan invited Coplan to Miami to speak at its private banking client conference. According to The Wall Street Journal, in April 2026, JPMorgan even invited clients from its wealth management division to participate in Polymarket's funding round at a $14.5 billion valuation.

In other words, JPMorgan is still vying to become one of the underwriters for a potential Polymarket IPO in the future.

But once there is an IPO, there is no token issuance either.

In response to the Financial Times report, Polymarket's wording was quite forceful: "We maintain a close, active working relationship with JPMorgan across multiple entities, operational integration, and the handling of client fund flows... Any claim to the contrary fundamentally misrepresents our relationship."

Meanwhile, on August 11, CNBC reported that Polymarket had aggressively recruited a group of executives with orthodox finance/regulatory backgrounds, including a chief compliance officer from Robinhood, a head of regulatory affairs from Coinbase, a former FBI official as global head of investigations and intelligence, and a chief risk officer from Nasdaq. This round of appointments was clearly laying the groundwork for the surge in trading volume brought by the NFL season and the November midterm elections. On September 16, Polymarket also launched a dedicated "2026 Midterm Elections Hub" page.

Midterm elections page, source: Polymarket

Why, Legally Speaking, Polymarket Is Moving Further Away From a Token

The silence on the token and JPMorgan's cutoff may look like two unrelated matters on the surface. At present, no authoritative media outlet has reported a causal chain in which JPMorgan pressured Polymarket to abandon the token. It must be honestly stated that the existing evidence cannot prove a direct causal relationship between the two — only speculation by analysts.

But looking from a broader perspective, they actually share the same soil.

Polymarket is undergoing a thorough rehabilitation: a $1.4 million CFTC fine in 2022, an FBI raid on the founder's residence after the 2024 election, a $112 million acquisition of licensed contract market QCX in July 2025, a $2 billion strategic investment from Intercontinental Exchange (ICE, the parent company of the NYSE) in October 2025 and a return to the U.S. market by the end of the year, and then negotiations for a new funding round in August 2026 that pushed its valuation past $20 billion. This is a clear path, from a gray-area gambling site to regulated financial infrastructure.

On this path, a governance token is a rather dangerous thing to have. It could trigger securities law disclosure obligations, could complicate the equity structure of a future IPO — should value accrue to equity or to the token? — and could conflict with the compliance-friendly image the company is deliberately cultivating.

So, Are We Really Not Going to Get It?

Strictly speaking, the existing evidence does not support the conclusion that "Polymarket has already abandoned the token." A more accurate statement would be: this is not a cancellation, but an indefinite shelving.

And this is not the first time it has been delayed. As early as October 2025, the market had a round of expectations for a "token launch before the end of the year"; by May 2026, pricing on predict.fun had pushed that probability to 56%. But the World Cup came and went, and the end of the year is almost here, and POLY still has not appeared.

If the SEC's new rules come online and fully clarify the obligations between token rights and equity rights, we may still be able to see $POLY appear. Until then, $POLY may not truly disappear. But at a company that increasingly resembles a traditional financial institution, it will likely be shelved indefinitely.